So my mother recently bought an ET-2800, By HP we had an HP printer before and we got a new one because the old one would not work with my sister’s Windows 11 Laptop. So I had to set it up for my mother, the manual said you can use it without the app. But there was no way to physically do that. Anyway, I downloaded the app on my phone (android) and the app would not connect to the printer. So I used my mother’s iPhone and it would connect. The setup process was stupid proof. And after I got it all full of ink, it was very painless. However, this is where the H in HP should stand for HELL. Because a few months go by and my sister and my mother need some papers printed. No problem. I thought to myself, so my sister tried to print it wirelessly. Couldn’t find the printer, I said ok maybe it’s a dumb driver, USB didn’t work either. I asked my sister to send it to me, so I can print it on my w540 running rocky 9. Rocky picked up that I needed drivers and installed them. Wireless didn’t work but wired showed up, I thought sweet I can just print the paper and get back to what I was doing. However, when I clicked print, the printer would grab the paper and run it though but not put ink on the paper. My mother asks me to forward the email to her to try to print it on her phone. I send it, and it prints, and the paper come out how it should with ink and the paper is finally printed.
After this experience with this printer, it makes me rather aggravated at this purchase, and no longer want to buy from HP. I have looked at Brother printers and there are no Proprietary ink cartage, and or laser printers. I purely wanted to talk about my experience with HP printers and would like to know what others have for a printer for recommendations, for when eventually HP kills support and makes it a paper weight, I’ve read many negative experiences with HP printer, specially from Lois Ross man and their anti consumer products.
The HP LaserJet 4MP was pretty decent, but that came out in 1993.
I worked for HP for a while in college. HP Rep. It paid like 14 an hour when minimum wage was 6 and I just got to stand around in best buy or office max, etc, selling printers and training staff on features. It was retail but without all the bullshit like cleaning the bathrooms or running the register or needing to hit sales targets, etc. It was a real kushy job.
About halfway through my time there HP started pushing ePrint, or other cloud features, and ink subscriptions, etc. That was about the time I think their quality really started to nosedive. Printers have always been printers (brother notwithstanding, but now it’s starting to slip with inclusion of more invasive drm and ink subscriptions) but before the onset of cloud based stuff, it seemed, I dunno, better? Not great, but better
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That is some glorious DGAF reporting by The Verge there
They ain’t wrong though.
I went through OP’s pain about 3.5 years ago. My old, old printer from college (an HP, ironically) that was absolute bare bones (I think I actually got it for free as part of a bundle somewhere along the line) but also somehow (or maybe because of that) also a workhorse that never let me down for like 10 years…well I lost the damn proprietary cable in a move.
So I started shopping for it’s replacement. But before I could, I still needed my printing to be done ASAP, so I went to my parents house. There, we tried printing but their old HP just wasn’t having it. So we bought new ink and tried that. No dice. I tried everything I knew to try and nothing was working.
So I went to my girlfriend’s parents who also had an HP and we couldn’t get that one to work direct either. Had to eventually email the stuff to them to open on their computer and then with it’s hardwired connection, it finally printed for me.
Later that week my parents bought a new printer to replace the old one, and inexplicably, went with another HP. For them it was more “this is what was on sale at Sam’s Club” and less the result of careful review reading. But anyway, my mom, with all the tech literacy of a jug of milk, botched the setup. Called me like she always does, to solve her tech issues with only her horrible verbal translation of what’s going on, we can’t do it over the phone, so a few days later I go there and while it is fucked up, IDK how much of that was HP being shitty and how much of that would’ve worked if it hadn’t been attempted by my mom. Regardless, we finally get printer powered up and talking to the computer and it STILL won’t actually print stuff we’re sending it. Until the next day when my mom says she tried it again and it worked, no issues.
By that point I was fed up with HP, but I still needed a printer, needed color, and was totally against going inkjet yet again.
Ended up with a Brother color laser printer and it’s been the printer of my dreams from day one.
In my cramped apartment, it sits in another room from the rest of my computer stuff, quietly waiting on standby for the handful of times each year that I need it, at which point it quietly comes to life, prints perfectly, the first time, every time, and never causes any issues at all.
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In my later years it was Lenovo old and new after trying to accommodate a flashy Asus laptop one of the office staff had to have. It didn’t work with any of the desktop docks and there was no FN lock. After that I preferred even older off lease Lenovo over anything else. Tried to accommodate a Macbook for the same user later on and then said she was on her own for that. I said I hadn’t used a Mac since they were in a lovely solid grey case with a monochrome screen and floppy drive built in and it’s wasn’t one of the M&M shaped ones from her youth either.
Thankfully I was one of the owners so I could at that stage 😇
HP haven’t always been this bad, but they are this bad now, and nobody should be giving them money.
HP was the gold standard back in the day. Money says you can still buy kits and toner for IIIs, IVs, and Vs.
Work gave me a tiny HP laser when we did a refresh, and it’s a damned beast. Probably 12-yo, thousands and thousands of pages, never a glitch or jam. Toner cartridges are $18 and last forever.
I had to stop using my LaserJet 5si. Not because it broke, but because Windows stopped shipping drivers. Could have hacked around it, but I figured that new toner cartridges would be harder to come by if it doesn’t easily work on Windows anymore, so time to move on.
Carly Fiorina destroyed HP. She tanked product quality by using cheap plastic parts instead of metal and she can’t manage people. She’s a terrible leader and on a personal level she’s just not right in the head, as she embraces trumpism, is racist, elitist, etc.
She’s also the only person to lose in the same presidential primary twice!
She lost as a candidate, and then after she conceded, lost again as Ted Cruz’s VP candidate.
I can’t believe the GOP actually pushed her as having “business experience” in her Senate run. She’s often cited as one of the worst CEOs ever. She made HP into another race to the bottom shit company, and it has yet to recover.
Well, I mean, when you look at their other example of “business experience”…
Hp printers were shit well before her.
I beg to differ.
The old LaserJet 4s, 5s, the IIs and IIIs, the 8000 series, all those were great, well built printers with metal frames and heavy duty parts. They were made to last.
We still have a LaserJet 5M that prints reports hooked up to an airgapped Linux server. The printer never breaks down or needs anything more than toner. Yes, it’s slow. Amusingly slow. The page count is over 250k. The fuser is starting to ghost but it’s easily replaced. We just don’t care enough to do it right now. The printer doesn’t care.
Try this with any printer built after the Fiorina era and you’d be hard pressed to.
I’m all ears if you have a specific model in mind that was shit before Carly. Because, before her, HP was an industry leader. Now it’s cheap plastic junk, and it’s squarely on her failure as CEO that led to the company’s demise.
I take it back. My recall of that CEO had her more recently (like 2015 or so). Must’ve confused with a different company and incompetent CEO.
Mark Hurd, another former ceo, sexually harassed anything moved.
HP’s ceo hires have been…interesting. They’ve all been pretty bad.
Yeah, HP are terrible now.
They weren’t always this bad, I had a laserjet 4000 that was made around the turn of the century and it “just worked”.
I still have a LaserJet 2200 and it will be pried from my cold dead hands. The plastic has gone brittle on some spots of it, and the front manual feed cover has long broken but it still dutifully works.
When I worked in IT, there was a LaserJet 4 at one office. That thing was almost 2 decades old when i changed careers. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s still there.
HP pretty much pioneered enshittification
weren’t a
Average Cory Doctorow enjoy-er
Very Based–edit i accidentally quoted “weren’t a” i enjoy his books, i now realize it looked like i was mocking him. that was not my intent :P
Wut
Their inkjets were always trash fire.
For well over 20 years, yes.
HP practically invented the concept of “destroy the brand name of your high end professional equipment with the worst consumer garbage ever.” Their inkjets are infamous
They were early pioneers in the art of enshittification.
The company also prohibits users from trying to use third party inks, right? Also, I am surprised at the app fication of everything. One shouldn’t need an app just to print something. Almost like tech is taking one step forward but HP is taking two step backwards.
In the 80s and 90s HP printers were great. They just worked, even in rough dirty manufacturing environments. You could just about drop kick one, and it would still print out a page for you. Now they’re crap. The investment firm that owns the brand is past beating the dead horse, now trying to squeeze every last dollar out of the carcas.
This is so true. In fact I’m still using a 90’s HP laser jet printer and it’s a beast.
I’m not even going toreadd your post. Not to be rude, but becuase: 1) yes, HP is that bad. And 2) buy a Brother laser printer.
my HP’s have been great, however I have a laser, I would never buy an ink jet. And yah They are so much better than brother,
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Just wait till you run into one of the HP printers that will not work until you sign up for the HP subscription service, and only use HP subscription ink cartridges, and only if it’s allowed to access the internet to report back that it’s printing. The subscription actually set the number of pages per month you are allowed to print, on the hardware you have them money for.
And it only works for a device with the HP app installed. Total garbage.
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You sound like a girl defending her boyfriend after he slapped her around and threatened to beat her ass again.
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I have one of those and it works perfectly from Linux using standard software. You can also go over the subscription, you just pay (still comparable to buying ink cartridges though, perhaps even a little cheaper if you’re printing photos). It also worked for 2 weeks with no internet connection, although it did complain about that lack of an internet connection after a week.
It has also proved to me that HP are conning everyone with non InstantInk cartridges. After 3 years we are still on the same cartridges, which I am sure it would have claimed were empty if it were not InstantInk.
Disclaimer: I got the printer for (effectively) free and use the free tier subscription which allows me 10(?) pages a month with no rollover. It has cost me about €2.50 in 3 years. I would never have paid for a modern HP printer.
Edit: I am not defending HP’s abhorrent business practices. However, in this case I found a loophole and was able to exploit it. It was also free because I had a awesome employer who gave out Fnac vouchers every year. I am also only able to exploit that loophole because I also have that little Brother laser that just works.
I didn’t have the chance to try on Linux. Good to hear it worked for you Since it was for my in-laws it had to work on Windows 10 laptop and a Chromebook. I learned a few years ago I cannot guide them onto a Linux install as much as I want to.
HP – Hell-Powered
HP printers are just bad. Their Linux drivers (HPLIP) are flimsy and sometimes break on updates. They come with GUI tools still stuck on Qt 4. Their hardware’s quality is also pitiful and the marketing approarch is outirght evil. I got an Envy printer recently (not my choice). It came with instructions to set it up via cloud with an HP account. Why shouldn’t I be able to use a damn printer without creating yet another useless account and giving out personal information is beyond me. At last I discovered the USB port (covered by a sticker which had the word USB crossed out) and managed to set up the printer after the fifth attempt or so, because CUPS didn’t recognize it and so didn’t the HPLIP setup tool. And then the next time I tried to use the printer it just refused… Then I gave it away because my patience had finally run out. Don’t mess with HP if you value your time and nerves.
My Windows machine treats their drivers and software like an allergic reaction, so it’s not just Linux. I had to write a script to force it to connect and keep checking mine every thirty seconds.
HP printers have always been shit nothing new… smh…
🌎👨🚀🔫👨🚀
I’ve only bought Brother laser printers for 15 years now, and have no intention of doing anything else. Never again, HP.
